FMC and femtocell equipment forecast to hit $7.4 billion in 2013

CALIFORNIA, USA: Infonetics Research released the second edition of its biannual FMC and Femtocell Equipment, Phones, and Subscribers report, which provides market size, vendor market share, analysis, and forecasts through 2013.

“So far, we have found no evidence of the economic downturn having a major impact on the pace of FMC rollouts, and it has had only a mild effect on the femtocell space. In the first half of 2009, we saw unabated UMA rollouts at T-Mobile USA, Orange, and Rogers Wireless in Canada, with Turk Telekom joining the bandwagon more recently,” notes Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile and FMC infrastructure at Infonetics Research and co-author of the report.

“As for the femtocell market, the lack of a clearly defined business model is persuading some service providers to postpone launching femtocell services until the market recovers, while others are moving forward. AT&T is the first operator in the US to launch 3G femtocell services to improve indoor voice and data coverage, and Verizon and Vodafone also have launched commercial femtocell services. We expect at least a dozen major operators to launch in 2010, giving this market a kick-start,” explains Richard Webb, directing analyst for WiMAX, microwave, and mobile devices at Infonetics Research and co-author of the report.

Report highlights
* Combined, sales of FMC network element equipment and femtocell equipment are forecast to grow to $7.4 billion worldwide by 2013.
* The number of 2G and 3G femtocells sold for use in GSM/GPRS, CDMA, W-CDMA/HSPA and CDMA2000/EV-DO networks is expected to increase five-fold from 2009 to 2010.
* Sales of security gateways deployed to enable femtocells and dual mode handsets are expected to top $1.0 billion in 2013.
* Nokia increased its lead in the massive dual service phone market in two consecutive quarters, with over a third of worldwide revenue in 2Q09.
* In the very tight race for second position in the worldwide dual mode service phone market, Samsung, Apple, and HTC are within one or two percentage points of each other.
* Worldwide manufacturer revenue from dual mode cellular and WiFi phones dropped 29% in the first half of 2009 compared to the previous six months, as the recession bit into the overall mobile phone market.
* The number of worldwide seamless FMC subscribers is forecast to grow nearly 10-fold between 2008 and 2013, to 82 million.